Report: Terror Leader Dead

JERUSALEM — Abu Nidal, who for two decades pursued a path of murder, assassination, bombings and hijackings and who earned a reputation as a efficient, cool killer, was found dead in his apartment in Baghdad, Palestinian officials said Monday.

In death as in life, if, in fact, he is dead, the guerrilla mastermind provided grist for somber speculation and grisly tales of intrigue. From the early 1970s to the early 1990s, Abu Nidal had no equal in the opaque Middle East world of vendetta and revenge.

Various accounts about his death have circulated for days in the Palestinian media, including some that said he died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound and others that claimed he had been shot several times. None of the accounts could be confirmed.

"It's all innuendo," said Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former FBI terrorism analyst. "Nobody really knows. He has `died' before."

Abu Nidal has been one of the most sought-after men in the world, and one of its most elusive. The State Department once branded him its most-wanted terrorist, and he was at the top of the CIA's unofficial "must-get" list for decades. But he was never apprehended, and his name faded from the roster of notorious terrorists as Osama bin Laden and and others espousing more lethal Islamic-based terrorism rose to prominence.

"Before there was bin Laden, there was Abu Nidal, he was Public Enemy No. 1, the most lethal, destructive terrorist organization around," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp, a think tank. "But when you look at the death toll he amassed, he was the old-style terrorist content to kill in the tens to get his point across."

Once an associate of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Abu Nidal later dismissed Arafat as too soft on Israel and plotted to kill him. The PLO responded by throwing him out of the organization and sentencing him in absentia to death. According to news reports, Abu Nidal and his followers were blamed for murdering 300 people and wounding 650 people in 20 countries.

Terrorism experts said that Abu Nidal's life has been enshrouded in mystery since his organization's last attack in 1994, when he was thought to have been responsible for the assassination of a Jordanian diplomat in Beirut. His death has been reported several times in the past but never verified.

Abu Nidal's story is rooted in the Palestinian refugee struggle. He was born Sabri al-Banna to wealthy parents in the port town of Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv, when the area was part of British-governed Palestine. The creation of the Jewish state in 1948 forced al-Banna and his parents out of the family's 18-room mansion and into refugee camps in Jordan.

Within a few years, his family moved to Nablus, a town that is now considered a hotbed of West Bank militancy.

By 1960, al-Banna joined the fledgling Fatah organization and the then young teacher began an evolution. He named his first born Nidal -- the Arabic word for struggle -- and took on what became his nom de guerre, Abu Nidal, or father of Nidal. After the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, Abu Nidal joined the Palestine Liberation Organization.

He became its representative, first in Khartoum and then Baghdad, until his split with Arafat in 1974 to form the extreme Fatah-Revolutionary Council. Among his most notorious attacks were twin assaults on the Israeli airline El Al's ticket counters at Rome and Vienna airports on Dec. 27, 1985. Eighteen people were killed and 120 were wounded.

Abu Nidal was also linked to a string of attacks, including: a rocket attack on a Jordanian airline in 1984; the killing of a British journalist in April 1986 in retaliation for British support of U.S. air raids in Libya; a mortar and machine-gun attack near a British army base in Cyprus in August 1986; and an attack a month later by gunmen who killed 22 people and wounded 100 in an attempted hijacking of a Pan Am jet in Karachi.

Nidal's group was the most notorious and sophisticated organization to use terror as a weapon against nations. As such, according to terrorism experts, it was a model for bin Laden's al-Qaida network, although it did not share its religious views.

Nidal's operations withered after the 1991 Gulf War when Iraq, his major financier, was left impoverished. His last serious attack, according to media reports, was said to be the assassination of a Jordanian diplomat in 1994, the year Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel.

Abu Nidal was known to have lived in Tripoli, but he was thrown out by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in a crackdown on militants after the 1988 Pan Am airline bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. Abu Nidal reportedly moved onto Egypt, then Baghdad in the past decade.

The U.S. State Department provided no information about the death, the Israeli Foreign Ministry would not comment and Palestinian officials were under orders not to discuss the onetime Fatah member.

In Baghdad, deputy Palestinian ambassador, Najah Adbul-Rahman, said that he had no information regarding what he described as rumors about Abu Nidal's death. Abu Nidal, 65, was said to be suffering from cancer.

In Nablus, Abu Nidal's brother said Monday that he had no information to indicate his brother died in Baghdad, but he added that he had not heard from him in 38 years.